How Your Business Can Use SEO for Brand Awareness [2024]

When we talk about SEO, the conversation is mostly around generating organic search traffic for a website.

Have you ever thought that SEO can make an impact on your business as well in terms of brand awareness?

Let’s find out.

SEO Helps with Building Brand Awareness for Your Business

According to Hootsuite’s 2022 Digital Overview report, 61% of users (aged 16 to 64) use internet to find information and in the same report 45.8% users research on brands and products.

Your business becomes familiar or recognizable to your target audience as a brand when:

• Your target audience sees you consistently in organic search results and across multiple digital channels.
• Your website visitors find the exact information about a product or service they are looking for.
• The information in your website that helps in building trust with your target audience.
• You provide a great user experience (it can be user interactions or making a purchase) through your website.

In the long run, you will get more direct website visits, visits through search queries that include your brand name, and visits through brand mentions in other well-known websites.

Also, you can then amplify your brand reach by leveraging social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram Reels.

For instance, brand-specific searches on Google for time saving “delivery” and “pick up” apps have grown 107% year-over-year. This is Google’s own statistic released in 2017.

This in turn generates more business enquiries (through calls, chats, emails, or contact forms) and sales conversions for your business.

When you become a popular brand in your niche then Google takes notice of it.

Google Prefer Brands on Top of its Search Results

Like many social media platforms, Google is also combating fake news, misinformation, disinformation, spam, and phishing on its search engine platform.

To counter these threats, Google need websites that act as helpful, relevant, and trustworthy sources of information.

In addition, Google has recently updated its Search Quality Rater Guidelines which is a 168-page document that human quality raters use to assess the quality of Google search results.

A major update you can find in that document is the E-E-A-T which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

As the words indicate, Google looks for webpage or website content that is written by the site owner with experience in that particular niche topic, must have expertise and authority in that niche, and trusted by their target audience.

Google feels brand websites fulfil the above-mentioned requirements as these websites are well-known, have reputation, and have built trust with their respective audiences over time.

And therefore, these brand websites get more preference in Google search result rankings.

Even Neil Patel in one of his videos said that the more popular is your brand then more positioned is your website on Google search results.

Now you have understood why you need to refocus your SEO efforts from generating organic website traffic to building brand awareness.

11 Ways You Can Use SEO for Building Brand Awareness

Here are 11 ways you can use SEO for building brand awareness for your business.

Keep in mind that this process requires consistent effort and it rewards you in the long run.

1. Optimize Your Brand Name and Logo

It is crucial that you need to ‘optimize’ your brand name and logo before thinking about marketing or promotional campaigns.

Make sure your brand name is short, easy-to-remember, and resonate with your core business.

For example, the name of my digital marketing blogging website is ‘Maxsemo’ which is combination of two Latin words ‘Maximum Semoto’ which means ‘maximum reach’.

You can purchase the domain of your choice along with good web hosting at an affordable price from Bluehost, Namecheap, or from Hostinger.

When it comes to creating company logo, it is better to adopt a minimalistic design.

This design approach helps in making your logo eye-catchy, memorable, and make a significant impact on your target audience.

In addition to that, your online marketing materials (website, posters, banners, and brochures) with your logo are easily consumed by your audience via smartphones, tablets and even digital signages.

You can use an online graphic designing tool like Canva, Picmaker or Figma to create your brand logo.

2. Enhance Your Website’s User Experience

For the past few years, Google have been stressing website owners to give priority for user experience for website visitors.

They have even included ‘page experience’ as an official ranking signal.

Keeping this in mind, your website design (or redesign) should offer a great user experience for your target audience and make them come back to your website again.

To get a great impression during their first visit, make sure that your website is:

• Highly responsive for mobile and tablet devices.  
• Leveraging your brand colours (instead of random colours).
• Easily navigable through various webpages.
• Helping in enhancing readability.

Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Elementor and Weebly are some of the most popular online tools that can help you to design and build your website.

When Google gets an SEO signal that you are providing your visitors an awesome website experience then Google will start ranking the website for your target search queries.

This way, you can get more brand impressions and raise curiosity to know more about your business.

3. Fix Your On-page and Technical SEO Gaps

When it comes to on-page SEO, make sure your business name is mentioned prominently in appropriate pages (About Us, Contact Us, Careers, etc) of your website.

It includes your title tags, meta descriptions, image alt texts, anchor texts and main body content.

Even if your website is ranking top on Google SERPs, your audience don’t have much patience to wait when your website is loading too slow. [Even if you are an established brand.]

Google says that when your website is taking more than 3 seconds to load then the site’s bounce rate will increase by 32%.

So, it’s better to fix it ASAP since it impacts your website’s search result rankings.

If your website is targeting audience from multiple locations across the globe then adding a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service as reduces website loading time drastically.

Make sure all the basic on-page and technical SEO gaps are properly implemented fixed on your website.

4. Leverage Branded Search Queries

When your business becomes an established brand in your niche, it’s quite natural that people will search you on Google using your brand name.

In time, more and more search queries that contain your brand name starts to appear on Google. These are called branded search queries.

For example, when you type ‘Tesla’ you can see it’s branded search queries in the Google autosuggest as shown in the screenshot below.

Your target audience who use branded search queries are far more likely to purchase from business, as they are already aware of you.

By increasing the search volume of your branded keywords, you can increase the brand exposure for your target audience, through your website.

Optimizing for your branded search terms can help in increasing your SEO rankings for non-branded search terms as well.

You can check your Search Console or Analytics to see how many branded queries have generated and their search performance (clicks and impressions).

5. Push Out Press Releases

We already knew that publishing press releases can create quality backlinks and thereby improves your SEO rankings.

Press release is a great way to build credibility and attract media attention for your business.

When you publish your press release on your website or submit it to PR distribution networks like PR Newswire and EIN Presswire, it will get picked up by mainstream media outlets.

They can help in lending more credibility to your message and make their audience to generate interest in knowing more about your business.

You can also leverage Google News platform to get more visibility for your press releases that you publish on your website.

[For Google News to index your news/PR articles, first you need to get approval from them by submitting your news/blog page.]

6. Track Your Brand Mentions

You need to track your brand mentions that may appear on news/blogging websites, review websites, online forums, and social media channels.

For tracking brand mentions, you can use tools like Semrush, Mention, BrandMentions, Mentionlytics, and Google Alerts.

When mainstream media outlets and well-known industry blogs mention your brand name in their respective articles, often times it is not linked to your website.

You can send a request to the concerned website owner to link the brand mention to your website.

This way, you can get a quality backlink, referral traffic, and brand impressions.

You can also check out this article on how to leverage brand mentions to further boost up your website’s SEO.

7. Maintain Your Online Reputation

When you are using SEO for building brand awareness then at the same time you have to maintain your reputation from fake news, fraud, and misinformation.

Make sure to check for bad reviews, comments, complaints, and defaming articles published on other websites and social media channels.

You can find them by tracking your brand mentions, using tools mentioned in tip #6.  

Try to reach out to them and resolve their issue in an amicable way. You can request the website owner to take down fake news articles and complaints.

If left unchecked, these pages start to rank on Google search results when people look for your brand. It will certainly damage your brand reputation.

8. Create Content that Focuses on Raising Awareness

You need to create content (whether it be blogs, product/service pages, ebooks, etc) that focuses on raising brand awareness.

About 88% of businesses use content for building brand awareness, according to Content Matters 2022 report published by WordPress VIP.

Among website content formats, blog is still the most effective to get more SEO traffic for your website.

You can create, promote and update your blogs consistently to grow and maintain your search visibility on Google.

Create blogs on topics that your target audience sees as helpful and valuable.

Use tools like Buzzsumo, Exploding Topics, and Google Trends to find trending topics in your niche.

Focus on long-tail search queries as they are more specific and have high conversion value.

Finally, you can repurpose existing blog content to create tweets, Facebook/Linkedin posts, Reels/TikTok videos, infographics, carousels, and downloadable ebooks.

This way, your content gets maximum reach across different platforms. 

9. Testimonials, Reviews, and Case Studies

Adding client/customer testimonials and reviews on your website can help in building trust with your target audience.

Request your loyal customers/clients in sharing their testimonials and you need to make sure that keep updating your testimonials quarterly or yearly.

You can convert others in your existing customers into brand advocates for your business.

Another way of building trust with your target audience is by publishing case studies on your website.

You can create case studies on how you solved your customer/client’s problem using your product or service.

10. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

If you have local presence and conduct business with your customers/clients at your office then you must optimize your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business).

Make sure your business name, office address, and contact number details are up-to-date. Also, provide a proper (and updated) description and map location of your company.

If you have offices at multiple locations then make sure to list all of them in your Google Business Profile.

You can add both photos and videos of office premises, your team setup, and customer testimonial videos.

You can even add an immersive virtual tour of your office using Google Streetview feature.

When it comes to reviews, make sure you respond appropriately to every positive or negative review that appears on your profile.

You can also expand your local SEO presence on Bing by listing your business on Bing Places for Business.

11. Check Your Presence in Other Search Engines

We know that Google is the dominant leader in the search engine space with 93% global market share.

Still, you can leverage Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo as these search engines have very low SEO competition and therefore you can easily rank your website.

Also, there are regions where Google is not the dominant search engine. For example, Baidu is the popular search engine in China, Yandex in Russia, and Yahoo in Japan.

If you are targeting audience in any of the above-mentioned countries, first you need to convert your website content into respective regional languages and then submit to those search engines for indexing.

You can increase your online presence on these search engines since the competition for SERP rankings is lower compared to Google.

Final Thoughts

When you start using SEO for building brand awareness your target audience visits your website when they see your name where ever you are in the first page of search results.

Also in the long run, you won’t be bothered about fluctuations in SERP rankings or website traffic caused mostly by algorithm updates.